Sir Paul McCartney: I wish the Beatles had gone on for ever

SIR Paul McCartney said the Beatles would have reunited had they all still been alive.

Sir Paul McCartney said he was the one who had tried to keep the band together []

The 69-year-old believes he and ­Ringo Starr would have got back ­together with John Lennon and George Harrison if they had survived.

He said he and Lennon even planned to make a high-profile comeback seven years after they split in 1969.

McCartney said he was the one who had tried to keep the band together and wanted them to perform “for ever”.

He said in a US interview: “If John and George were still here it’s highly likely we would’ve had a Beatles ­reunion. I think we would’ve mellowed to the point where we would’ve said, ‘Come on, let’s do it’.

“The thing was whenever we got ­together, no matter if we were arguing, we played great. We knew each other so well; we read each other. So if Ringo would speed up a little bit, we all would speed up. So we were like hands in a glove.”

If John and George were still here it’s highly likely we would’ve had a Beatles ­reunion

Sir Paul McCartney

McCartney, who is due to marry third wife Nancy Shevell shortly, added: “It would’ve been great, but I’m not a great believer in ‘What if?’ You can’t do it, but I suppose it’s nice to speculate.”

McCartney said that he and Lennon were on the verge of playing together again in public in 1976 after US TV ­producer Lorne Michaels offered $3,000 for them to reunite on comedy show Saturday Night Live.

He said: “I was at John’s place and Saturday Night Live was on and John said to me, ‘Have you seen this?’ I hadn’t, I was living in England, he was living in America. He said, ‘No, they’re offering us money to get back together – Lorne Michaels came on the show last week’.

“And John said, ‘We should go down, just you and me. We’ll just show up. There’s only two of us, we’ll take half the ­money’. For a second we were like, ‘Shall we do it?’ I don’t know what stopped us. It would’ve been work and we were having a night off so we ­elected to not go to work.

“It was a nice idea. We nearly did it.”

McCartney admitted the break-up of the band hit him hard and recording his debut solo album “saved him”.

“The loss of the Beatles was very ­difficult,” he said. “It was in hurtful ­circumstances so it was particularly difficult. We weren’t speaking to each other. These guys who’d grown up ­together and had all this success suddenly weren’t speaking to each other.

“I certainly had wanted us to keep going, but John certainly didn’t.

“He’d found Yoko [Ono] and they were into a new thing, which turned out to be a great thing for them.

“For the rest of us it was a bit, ‘Hmm, what are we going to do now?’ But I’d found Linda and so that made things OK. So personally I was OK. Musically, business-wise it was bad news.

“So that’s how the McCartney album came about: either I give up music or I just keep going.

“How could I keep going without a band? Oh, I know, I’ll play drums which I’d always had a secret yearning for anyway. So that’s how I did it. Played a bit of drums, played a bit of guitar.

“The album saved me during a very difficult time. Doing something like Maybe I’m Amazed was putting my feelings into a song at a very difficult time and showing Linda how I felt. It was kind of like a form of therapy.”

He went on: “People actually thought I was the one who’d broken the Beatles up when I was the one trying to keep it together.” McCartney said the band felt like they’d done everything but ­admitted he would have like them to “go on for ever”.

“We were kind of conscious we’d kind of come full circle. We felt round about Let It Be time that we’d kind of done it all.

“Part of the success for the Beatles was that for a band we kind of did do it all. You think of Love Me Do then you think of A Day In The Life.